


big blue

by youremynumberone



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Aged-Up Characters, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Jihoon centric, M/M, Mumblecore, Wonwoo POV, author gifts jihoon a truck and a motorcycle, author gifts kai farmer jihoon, past soonhoon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-15 02:41:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29056866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youremynumberone/pseuds/youremynumberone
Summary: When Wonwoo asks Jihoon what he thought the strange sounds were, before he realized they were whale calls back in 1996 with Soonyoung, he says, “I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.”
Relationships: Jeon Wonwoo/Lee Jihoon | Woozi, Kwon Soonyoung | Hoshi/Lee Jihoon | Woozi
Comments: 3
Kudos: 19





	big blue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heartspound](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartspound/gifts).



> Heavily inspired by the essay 52 Blue by Leslie Jamison. Links and references at the endnotes. 
> 
> Thank you sweet Ki for reading this through for me. Title is from Big Blue by Vampire Weekend.

November 2005

Whidbey Island is built on 37 miles of rugged terrain, cliffs and farmland. Salt is mixed into the asphalt and logs litter the sidelines of the wide highway. Houses here are built small and low and spread apart. Wonwoo stops the car in front of one, and although he can’t quite see it from where he is parking, he assumes the water is right behind the bungalow. 

The sky is overcast and there is a quiet howling in the wind as it picks up with the afternoon slowing down.

He’s waiting for him, smaller and boxier in person than in the photos found online. His hair is shaved very close to his head and what remains of it has gone a soft gray at 31. Right now, he has the look of a beach vacationer cleaned up for a dinner out, in a printed and oversized blue polo shirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts. 

Wonwoo approaches tentatively. 

The man tuts and a fat white cat ambles by. 

“Daisy Mae,” he calls, standing up. “We have a guest.” Then he waves Wonwoo over.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Lee. My name is Jeon Wonwoo and I’m from the--”

“I know, I know. You were all I heard from my answering machine this week. Tsk, not that there’s anyone else who could be calling. What am I saying, please, just Jihoon is okay. No need for such formalities. Have you had tea?” Jihoon talks and talks, already pulling open his screen doors. “Or should we talk about this over beer? Do you mind?”

Wonwoo looks back at the rented car. 

“I’m driving,” he says, wincing at the little whine in his voice as he climbs up the patio. He realizes then he towers over Jihoon, who is just three years older than he is. 

Jihoon looks up at him, like he’s sizing him up, and then chuckles. “Not to worry, yeah? This homebrew I got isn’t as strong as the ones you're used to. You'll be fine. C’mon, inside, inside.”

Wonwoo came across this story by desperation.

He was initially writing about the DOPS for his first by-line but something about the austerity of the first half of his draft had his editor calling it quits. He had expected something more melodramatic because, “you're writing about children remembering their past lives”, Seungkwan's face was crestfallen, “but your story makes me feel nothing! Nada! I’m sorry sweetheart, I know it’s hard for you to go out there but I need you to find something people will weep over or you're going back to obits.”

The hell was he going back to writing about what the dead did before they died.

And so he walked out of Seungkwan’s office and started to pour over their archives one Friday evening. 

Running on nothing but Gatorade, a packet of crackers, and a simmering frustration, Wonwoo went through box after box, folder after folder, and then an hour past midnight, discovered a heap of letters kept in an unlocked drawer. They were sent to their news outfit last year following the publication of the Woods Hole guys in a journal called Deep Sea Research. He feels the wind knocked out of him when he realizes he remembers this distinctly. 

Someone from the Features wrote a small thing about it and Wonwoo remembers reading it, could still recall the unease that he felt recognizing something familiar about the whale they called 52 Blue, how it kept making a unique call only the whale itself is capable of making and understanding, alone in the big blue of the world, swimming and drifting by itself, on and on and on. The story gathered a handful of sympathizers and even more fans. There were more than a dozen letters from whale lovers and environmentalists, divorcees, the deaf and disabled, all lamenting the notion of a lonely creature alone and solitary in the heart of the ocean. _Something people will weep over_ , he hears his editor again. 

Wonwoo looks at the three names credited for the research and looks them up one by one. The head researcher, Kwon Soonyoung, passed away a month after the article saw print. The other name, Choi Seungcheol, only seems to come up in searches somewhere in the Philippines. But the Lee Jihoon, that one, Wonwoo finds him easily and nearby. He is running a farm at the far end of Whidbey Island, just a little less than two hours north of Seattle. Wonwoo could make the drive. 

_A legend was born: the loneliest whale in the world._

Shit. The beer is strong and ugly bitter. Jihoon sips his like its water. They are sitting on his dining table and Wonwoo was right: the house stood by a crag that faced the sea. The windows are left open and the strange mix of the scent of salt, cat fur and droppings, and the homebrewed alcohol make for a remarkable odor he's sure will be clinging to his clothes after.

"So which article led you to me?" He asks, obviously already familiar to journalists and writers alike coming to his door. 

Before making the drive, Minghao, one of their Photog guys, had offered a kind warning to Wonwoo. That Jihoon was a strange man, because he often agreed to talk but would give away nothing. Sometimes could get hostile too. A dude from the other Daily had reached out to him earlier this year but Jihoon shut the door in his face. Said he was tired of talking about the goddamn whale. 

So Wonwoo weighs what he says next. Gears for honest, instead of the easy.

"Actually, it was the letters."

Jihoon tenses a little. 

"Well that's new," he murmurs.

_In the years since, 52 Blue—or 52 Hertz, as he is known to many of his devotees—has inspired numerous sob-story headlines: not just “The Loneliest Whale in the World” but “The Whale Whose Unique Call Has Stopped Him Finding Love”; “A Lonely Whale’s Unrequited Love Song”; “There Is One Whale That Zero Other Whales Can Hear and It’s Very Alone. It’s the Saddest Thing Ever and Science Should Try to Talk to It.”_

“And what about the letters?”

By his second glass, Jihoon relaxes. Wonwoo is still nursing his first. He watches as Jihoon leans back into his recliner, the only different one among the other three matching dining table chairs, and crosses his fingers together over his stomach. He keeps a straight face and waits.

Wonwoo suddenly becomes fully aware just how much each word he says to Jihoon weighs. How precarious the whole conversation is. He clears his throat and sees again in his head how Jihoon looked a bit taken aback when he mentioned the letters. So he tries: “Did you know about them? Read any?”

Jihoon laughs without humor. Rolls his eyes a bit. “‘Course I’m aware. Didn’t read any though.”

Glancing around his own home and melting more into his seat, Jihoon goes on, “I just didn't have much interest in that kind of public--but intimate document. I much preferred other technical writings about our whale.” Our. He said _our_ , Wonwoo notes. He should bring out his notebook at least. He stays still, nervous to disrupt the moment. 

He has a strange way of talking, Wonwoo thinks, like he’s always deeply considering what to say next, but also just randomly going into tangents that seem to only make perfect sense to himself. 

“Because there were a lot. Weren’t there? I lost track when I learned there were more than ten, fifteen. Me and my guys, we only wrote say, about a dozen or so pages of it. Can you fucking imagine? Nearly a whole decade's work, all those years tracking and listening to that poor, lonely creature, all alone, moving by itself in this large, oceanic expanse. And out came thirteen pages. In exchange for a whole eight years of living.”

He hums, detects something underneath Jihoon’s rambling, murmurs instead, “I only read two of those.” The original Woods Hole study. And the other clipping he found in the folder at the office, which was more of a meditative essay than a scientific research paper. He suddenly feels immensely unprepared for this interview. 

Wonwoo had been calling Jihoon for a week and when he suddenly offered an opening this afternoon, something about the Farmer’s Market cancelling on his shipping, Wonwoo dropped everything and rented a car right away. He thought the long drive would give him the opportunity to think and plan the meeting, what he’s going to say, what he wants to know, what he will write, but the view along the way distracted him so much that it calmed him, pulled him out of his own head. Instead he found himself watching blankly the city disappear and gradually change into woods and then to the sea. And then he was already pulling up in front of Jihoon’s house.

“And did you understand those at least?” Jihoon asks, not unkindly, but with a sort of serious reverence in his tone that Wonwoo knows he can’t simply answer with a yes or a no.

Did he understand it? Thinking about it now. The story of a creature, lonely and isolated, making calls nobody will understand or even, merely, hear. Did a man as quiet, as much of a recluse, as solitary as a fucking giant whale in the deep of the sea, did Wonwoo understand it? Wonwoo had always been a self-sufficient person; he’d been alone since fifteen, working since sixteen. He’d been in and out of the dirtiest and ugliest parts of the service industry while getting by in community college, and only recently managing to pick up small but decent work in writing -- liked how solitary the work is, how thoughtful. Very minor at first, but still something. He got his words printed and soon he’ll get his name in tiny bold letters too. He is average by all meanings of the word, but he liked to know he could do it by himself, support his own needs and dreams without anybody’s help. The only price is this aloneness. He picks up the glass of the bad tasting beer and drinks large gulps. He can feel Jihoon watching. 

They are quiet. 

Wonwoo can feel Jihoon looking, so he meets his eyes. Nods a little bit. Doesn’t want to give away the strange knot he’s feeling, unable to articulate something so personal and stupid to his subject.

Jihoon tips his head back. And he must have seen something, heard something in Wonwoo’s silence because he nods too, and then says, “Okay.” 

He leaves the table and then disappears into the narrow hallway of the house. When he comes back out, he has in his hands folders filled with hundreds of papers that contain ordinary-looking graph lines of an extraordinary song. 

_We don’t know if it’s a malformation. … Is he alone? I don’t know. People like to imagine this creature just out there swimming by his lonesome, just singing away and nobody’s listening. But I can’t say that. … Is he successful reproductively? I haven’t the vaguest idea. Nobody can answer those questions. Is he lonely? I hate to attach human emotions like that. Do whales get lonely? I don’t know. I don’t even want to touch that topic._

Wonwoo eats a stale loaf of bread with a can of coke as he tries to transcribe everything he remembers from his trip to Whidbey, from the graphs he’s seen. Which… to be honest, isn’t a lot. He learned more from Jihoon talking his ear off, more than the lines and findings he had shown Wonwoo. He chews on his pen and then starts to mindlessly scribble questions and thoughts on his notebook.

He is halfway through some tangents on the hydrophone devices Jihoon said they had been using then from the Navy when he yawns, eyes tearing up. He is already bored. Something is not right.

It’s almost eleven at night and Wonwoo knows it’s late but an idea comes to him, and without thinking much about it, trusting his gut more than the bullet points he’d written on his pad, dials Jihoon’s number. It rings twice before he picks up. 

“Hello?”

“Good evening, Mr. Lee. This is Wonwoo from earlier to--”

“Jesus Christ. You are breaking multiple ethical rules in journalism calling this late in the night.” From the other end of the line, Wonwoo thinks he can hear the background noise of a television, and then it gets turned off. 

It’s quiet when he replies, “I am,” surprisingly feeling pliant and warmed just from hearing Jihoon’s voice. 

“Ya got home okay?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah I did. Uh, what was I going to say. Right. I’m currently trying to jot down what we talked about today with the SOSUS and the devices from the Navy and the--” he stops himself, steels himself. “Here’s the thing, Jihoon.” He did say he can call him Jihoon. “I’m pretty sure I can find out everything I need about the hydrophone tracking program or all the bounds of science this whale had crossed if I were to get my hands dirty with the archives.”

“Yes, y’can. Those have been well documented.”

“But I doubt people will care about that.”

“That hurts my feelings a bit.”

“I just,” Wonwoo sighs deeply. “I want to do the article differently.” What he doesn't say is he wants to do it right, for his first by-line, for his first personal subject.

“And? Just say what you want, Mr. Jeon. Or I’m hanging up. I have an early day on the farm.”

“Farm? Right. You farm.”

“Yeah? Why do you sound so surprised? I run a bit of a lot for Korean vegetables. Switched to land when I tired of the sea.”

Wonwoo nods, hears something click into place. He shifts in his seat, leans forward on his desk, as if Jihoon is just right across him and not 30 miles north of Seattle.

“Yeah, see, that’s what I want. I don’t want to write much about the whale or the graphs. That’s been done before. I want to write about you.”

Jihoon laughs. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Can I come again tomorrow?”

Whidbey Island is often said to be one of the longest islands in America. It’s long enough to hold a kite festival, an annual bike race and four inland lakes. It comes up to at least 55 miles if measured along roads traveled from the extreme north to extreme south, but this claim still isn’t strictly true. 

“Whidbey is long,” Jihoon is saying, “but let’s not stretch it.”

“You were born here?”

They are in Jihoon’s truck, the day after they first met. Jihoon seems intrigued by Wonwoo’s prospect of writing about him, so he lets him make the drive again. Or maybe he was just trying to get rid of Wonwoo quickly last night that he agreed, relented. It matters little to Wonwoo anyway. What’s important is he’s here.

The roar of the old truck is so deafening that they both have to raise their voices a bit, that Wonwoo can’t even take out his recorder because it won’t capture their conversation over the noise. Wonwoo leans closer instead and tries to focus on the steady stream of stories miraculously coming out of Jihoon.

“Nah. Born in Busan, a port city in Korea. But I was raised here. Grew up old here.”

Jihoon is a talker, is what Wonwoo discovers. Like a lid had been twisted open and now it pours. Just by asking the right questions, he gives multiple, many answers. Even more tangents, talking about people like Wonwoo already knows them, like Wonwoo is an old friend dropped by to catch up on a random Friday morning. And it’s funny how he looks often surprised when Wonwoo would ask about the names again, about places, huh, wait, where is that, about--

“The guys you worked with?”

Jihoon glances at Wonwoo, eyebrows a bit knitted together, and then shakes his head a bit before answering. “Oh, yeah, them, too. From other parts of the world, too. Choi came from some classified arduous duty on a base in Iceland. Big, dependable guy. Helped in the transitioning of the funding towards our project. He would come out to the bunker every few months during migration season and we would show him what we found. It was the other one I really worked with day in and out. He was the acoustic technician who first identified 52 Blue. Crazy guy. Genuinely obsessed with eavesdropping on marine life.”

When Wonwoo turns to look, a small smile is visible in Jihoon’s profile.

“I heard it first, y’know? But it was him who said-- _yah_ , I think this is a whale.”

“Wait, which guy? Soonyoung? The head researcher?”

Jihoon quiets, and then turns the truck left, away from the cemented highway and into a narrow gravel path. Doesn’t say anything for a while. Except when he halts the truck and mumbles, “We get off here.”

_Is he lonely? I hate to attach human emotions like that. Do whales get lonely? I don’t know. I don’t even want to touch that topic._

Jihoon’s farm is small in the peculiar way something vast can be small. Which means Wonwoo can see where the crops end and the woods begin. It isn’t endless, but it’s wide nonetheless. 

He follows Jihoon as he approaches the pretty greens and vegetables, rows upon rows of robust crops of Korean eggplants, choy sum, perilla, shiso, long beans, cucumbers, and a flatbed with little seedlings Jihoon identifies as chrysanthemum greens, radish and celtuse.

“Wow… You did this by yourself?”

Jihoon nods, regards the view with pride. He appears to be surrounded by a healthy halo of gentle late morning light slanting into noon. The green behind him rendering his profile even more breathless. 

“By myself, yeah,” he replies quietly, a finger thumbing a leaf that reaches his hand.

Standing here like this, Wonwoo wishes he borrowed one of the cameras from Minghao. He would probably need a photo of Jihoon for the paper anyway, and while he’s here, he really should, he has to ask for another meeting, and soon, before the winter makes mornings like this bleak. He’ll tell Jihoon it’s so he wouldn’t have to use the old ones of him when he was still in his twenties posted online. Wonwoo can already imagine the slight smirk in Jihoon’s mouth when he says that, how he would probably try to say no, say why wasn’t I just as handsome then. And also how he would, Wonwoo hopes, still let him.

Because he looks gorgeous like this, and it’s not just the light, he just simply looks at peace. 

_I still don’t know what I am watching out for. When I hear ‘Whale 52 Hertz,’ I feel at peace. I know that I am still heading in generally the right direction. I often think of the whale. I know that it’s still out there. I see others searching. Maybe, I won’t be alone for much longer._

After Jihoon finishes inspecting the lot and checking on the boxes of harvested vegetables in the little barn close to the woods, they walk to the edge of Jihoon’s lot and meet with another farmer, whom Jihoon calls Junhui, who gives them two small yellow watermelons. 

Jihoon tosses one to Wonwoo and they walk back to the truck back up on the road. He tugs open the back of the truck and gestures for Wonwoo to climb up to sit. Jihoon jumps in as well, making the truck tremble a little. And then with an easy gesture, like he’s just cracking an egg, he touches his hands into the watermelon and the fruit raggedly breaks open in half. 

Wonwoo stares.

Not so much at the yellow ripeness of the fruit, but at Jihoon’s slender fingers, the juice from the melon rivering around the perfect white of his hands, the cool pinkness of his fingertips and nails. How are these a farmer’s hands, Wonwoo thinks, as he swallows, and is pulled out of the delicate moment when Jihoon nudges him with the other half of the fruit he had just broken open. 

“I can’t remember the last time I had fruit,” Wonwoo mumbles after sinking his teeth the first time into the cool, yellow meat, feeling the ripe nectar of it dribble down his chin a little. 

“Yeah. You don’t look very healthy,” comes Jihoon’s reply behind the green shell of the watermelon, covering half his face. When he puts his hand down, he stares at Wonwoo and adds, “I’m pretty sure I can lift y’with one arm.”

“Please don’t,” Wonwoo says, joining in Jihoon’s laughter, marveling at the ease with which they are talking. He leans back into his side of the back of the truck, letting the smile leftover from all the laughing linger in his mouth.

It’s quiet again and once all that’s left of the fruit is its emptied out husks, Jihoon picks up the other fruit and hands it to Wonwoo. 

“I don’t think I can open it like you did.”

“What, you don’t got a knife in your house?”

_All I really know is that the 52 Hertz Whale is out there singing and that makes me feel less alone._

A red bellied robin hops on the railings of the backyard, settles there. Jihoon whistles, catches the attention of the little thing. It stays there, like it’s watching Jihoon back.

Jihoon, who Wonwoo now knows was born during the first snow of 1974, to an overjoyed couple who had been trying to bear a child for a long time. Who was flown to Whidbey at four, who played band at nine, baseball at thirteen. His first love was his team’s pitcher, whom he confessed to, and who simply grinned at him, then uttered a heartfelt _Gee, thanks_ before throwing another fastball at him. 

He laughs loudly here, and Wonwoo is stunned into silence. 

When Wonwoo was on his way to Whidbey this morning, he had imagined sitting with a ramrod straight back on Jihoon’s dining table again, with a notebook on his lap as he fired one personal question after another, to fill his outline with. He did, somehow, imagine bonding with Jihoon, maybe an anecdote here and there about all the time they spent following the whale, the gentle and thoughtful work it entailed. Perhaps, Wonwoo would ask if Jihoon felt for 52 Blue, and Jihoon would deny it but there would be a break in his voice, and Wonwoo would copy it in his notes. 

What he doesn’t expect is how much more intimate this is, sitting side by side behind his house, the view of the ocean in front of them, hearing about a young Lee Jihoon, boyish and surely beautiful, when all that mattered was figuring out his body and its desires, long before he gained the technical ability that will be critical to the team that will eventually discover the whale, that will make the world aware of this marvelous, solitary being deep in the underside of the world. 

“I was reckless, then, I thought I had all the time in the world,” Jihoon is saying now, after listing one by one all his past, easy loves. There was Seokmin, the first one, the star pitcher, then there was Chan, all throughout high school-- “those years were so fucking messy, but we were both better for it later”, and then a series of even messier men during university: Mingyu, Hansol, Jisoo, and then Mingyu again. Wonwoo doesn’t know what to do with all that he knows, can’t possibly be writing about an intellectual, a purveyor of modern marine science, through these secrets, but he keeps the recorder on anyway. Amazed at how easily Jihoon gives even without prodding. 

“I bet you feel that way, too, right now,” he says, glancing at Wonwoo. “But I’m telling you, from someone who has been there and has been past it, you don’t. I talk like I’m a whole decade older than you, but I really just... We don’t live forever. So you better make each moment count with whoever it is you got back home.”

He shakes his head. 

“There’s nobody.”

Jihoon whips his head at him. And without missing a beat, says, "Impossible."

“I mean, used to have one," Wonwoo says, fidgeting and trying very hard to ignore the flush growing around his ears. "Someone. But I didn’t--couldn’t love him back enough. And he, well. He’s smart enough to see it and wise enough to expect more. I didn’t try again after.”

They both turn quiet again, just looking at the water in front of them, shivering a little as the day slows and lengthens into dusk. Up here, the ocean looks serene, almost solid. Wonwoo watches, over and over again, the small, inevitable and lonely crashing of the waves to the shore. He recognizes it as if he has been sitting in this backyard for all his life.

“And then where was I?” Jihoon asks. 

“What about the last one?”

“Ah, that...”

_Don’t assume. Don’t assume the contours of another person’s heart. Don’t assume its desires. Don’t assume that being alone means being lonely. The scientists would say of 52, of course: Don’t assume the whale is either one._

“You’re driving back again, noh?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Can you take at least a glass of beer? I’ll feel better talking about it when I’m drinking.”

Wonwoo knows he should say, You don’t have to talk about it if it’s hard. I have other questions here. But he knows he means it more when he replies with, “Sure, I’d like that. It’s okay. Sure.”

Jihoon is twenty-three when Kwon Soonyoung comes into his life. He arrives at the bunker one day, makes himself comfortable in the absolute dreary life of Jihoon and in a matter of months, puts to test all of the shaggy and dirty half-concepts of a relationship Jihoon has come to have shaped his life with. 

And in a matter of just two years--

“Do you like me? Jihoon, look at me. Do you like me?”

It was during that strange season where they lost 52 Blue. Couldn’t track him anywhere. Nothing was coming up in their devices and the bunker was filled with eerie silence. They should be worrying. But Soonyoung is, well.

Soonyoung reached across and twisted Jihoon’s chair to face him. 

“Hey, I’m talking to you.”

Jihoon looked him straight in the eye and said, “Yeah.”

“Yeah what?”

“Soonyoung… You already know what.”

“Well? Fucking say it! Let me hear it!”

“No.”

Soonyoung smiled then, just before he rolled his eyes. 

“God, you’re making this so difficult when it could have been so, so easy. Jihoon, say it to my face.”

“I like you,” Jihoon said, voice small and looking around Soonyoung, but not at him. At the spot behind him where the console glowed, ancient and slow. Trying very hard not to wince when he could hear in his own voice the familiar tremble that spun him back to all his shaky confessions, the terribly awkward moments he’s had in a dugout after losing a game, in a dirty dorm room, stealthily in the back of a car.

“That’s not--” Soonyoung had stood up, marched straight into Jihoon’s space, and caged Jihoon’s face in his two hands. “That’s not how you say it, Jihoon.”

“Then how? I don’t...”

Soonyoung moved closer. The grip he had on Jihoon’s face softened into a tender caress that felt new and at the same time tremendously real. His eyes held Jihoon’s, like hands. 

“Like this, Jihoon. When you like someone, you say it like this.”

And in all the years Jihoon had spent falling for the wrong person, fitting into whatever space he was given, reconstructing his story and self into what the other person had wanted to see for fear of not being liked, accepted, in all the years Jihoon had spent being shuffled around from one bed to another, from a rough arm to the next intoxicated, sloppy, secondhand touch, in all the years Jihoon had thought he had been given what he’s due, nothing compares to when Soonyoung’s face eclipsed the bulb above them, auburn hair turned golden by the light, and kissed him on the mouth, eyes closed and gently, so patiently, shaping his lips around Jihoon’s, and when Jihoon opened up to let Soonyoung in, all he could taste was gratitude. Their lips slid together, slotting perfectly, moving like they know what to want, and how to take, and like it isn’t the first time. Thank you, Jihoon thought, as he chased at Soonyoung’s mouth, pulling him down on his lap and feeling Soonyoung’s lips stretch into a little smile, for letting me know how. _I never knew it could be like this. But now I do. Soonyoung, I do._

“At least I knew. At least I had him for a while. He was… God,” Jihoon laughs, “he was everything to me. That’s so gross, right, but he really was. Showed me I can be loved right. Showed me I deserved it, even if most days I felt like I didn’t, ‘cos I can still be dumb, you know, and stupid and stubborn and really mean, but he never wavered. He was always just, here,” Jihoon says, resting a hand over his chest sounding winded and a bit like he’s uttering a prayer. And then letting his hand fly around him, as if to say, _Here, too_.

Wonwoo nurses the beer in his hand, and dumbfounded, raises it. He twists his body to look at Jihoon in the disappearing light of the sun setting, bewildered and for a moment, he forgets why he’s here, doesn’t matter really, and only feels for the here and the now and Jihoon beside him.

“To Soonyoung,” he whispers, feeling an intense billowing opening in his chest.

Jihoon chuckles. Also raises his still full glass of beer. 

“To Kwon Soonyoung,” he says. And if it sounds holy, then it fucking does. They clink their glasses together and both bring it close to their mouths to drink. Eyes on each other, they swallow huge gulps of the beer, and just when Wonwoo is about to pause to put his beer down, sees Jihoon keep going, and so he keeps drinking, too, which makes Jihoon laugh a little around the rim of his glass, spilling the beer around his chin a little, but still not stopping, and they both swallow everything, drinking and sipping and licking all the foamy dregs of the beer until nothing of the bitter is left. 

“There's something familiar about you. You're very easy to talk to. Like I can tell you everything about my goddamn life, like you really want to know,” Jihoon says, and he tilts his head, narrows his eyes, like he is considering very hard what he just said. Then he looks at Wonwoo a bit drunkenly. Holds his gaze for a second, two, three, and it is almost unbearable to be looked at like that, four. Then something in that moment gives. Five. Because Jihoon grins, closes his eyes and says, in a shallow, quiet breath, “I haven't felt this way in a long time.”

“When I work too hard and then lie down, even my sleep is sad and all worn out, you know? The next day, I get up, I go to the farm and follow the routine I have painfully built for myself. My body knows what to do, how to move. But, okay, you know what, I will tell you this, my heart also labors.”

“Y’know what he once said to me, he said,” Jihoon is lying on his bed and Wonwoo is on the floor. Two empty pitchers at an arm’s reach. “Wonwoo, are you still listening to me?”

“Yes,” he answers, turning on his side from the floor to face the bed. He can see the side of Jihoon’s face, the vague, perfect lines of it, as his eyes grow accustomed to the dark. His hands on top of each other, resting on his stomach. He turns to look at Wonwoo then.

“He said that his spirit animal was a tiger-- he was so serious about that stuff. And he said, he said that because I was born in the year of the tiger, he said that we were meant for each other.” 

It makes Wonwoo laugh airily, already feeling himself close to sleep. 

“Did you get everything you need for what you will write?” Jihoon asks after a moment.

Wonwoo thinks he says yes. Then he is already asleep and he dreams in the rhythm of a pulse of a minivan-sized heart.

_He’s everything and anything. Anything you want him to be. He’s the dream you could never attain. He’s the million-dollar lottery. He’s Shangri-la. He’s all these things that you aspire to. He’s God, even. How do you know that he wasn’t sent here to heal us, and his song is a healing song?_

The temperature drops the following week. 

Wonwoo is alone in his room, huddled around a blanket, typing the last sentences in his computer, for an article that starts about the whale, but ends up being about a certain Mr. Lee: _Sometimes we need to be heard so badly we hear ourselves in every song the world sings, every single noise it makes. Maybe every song is a healing song if we hear it in the right mood—on the heels of the right season, or the worst ones, the ones lost to us forever._

He finishes typing the last word when the phone rings. 

At a certain point in winter, there is a slow-growing feeling when it just begins that makes it feel like it will never end and there is no way to escape it. 

“Wonwoo.” It's Jihoon. 

“Yes?”

“Do you remember giving me your address last time?”

He doesn’t. 

“Well, you did, and you said I should come to you when I want to. And I’m. Well, I’m here.”

“Right now? Here? Where?”

“Seattle. Outside your door.”

“Shit. You drove the truck in this weather?” Wonwoo scrambles to rise to his feet, feels his heart rise with him, heating inside. He shrugs on a thick woolen jacket. In his kitchen sits a watermelon greener and the ripest it’s been since Whidbey, beside a pack of noodles and several unwashed mugs.

“No,” Jihoon says, and Wonwoo can hear him laughing. 

When Wonwoo swings the door open, Jihoon is standing with a motorcycle, a huge, menacing looking thing. He is wearing a thick leather jacket and is holding two helmets on both sides of his body. 

At a certain point in winter, there is a certain feeling that seeps out from the center of your body, somewhere in the heart, and Wonwoo becomes aware of the fact that he is nothing but vulnerable flesh wrapped in wool, protected only by mere wool when he trembles as he steps outside. 

“You...” Wonwoo starts, then just shakes his head, lacks the words for what is going on. He’s walking towards him and when Jihoon hands him the helmet, of course he takes it. If he shivers, he’s sure it’s just the weather.

“How’s the writing?”

Wonwoo puts it on and although his answer is muffled by the helmet, Jihoon hears, because he nods, and starts the bike. 

“Then we have all the time.”

Jihoon kicks the motorcycle to life just as Wonwoo wraps his arms around him. And he leans back, lets his body get locked in the arm span of Wonwoo’s heat and heart as they speed away.

It is an almost calm feeling, a blue feeling, that is a bit like grief, but is not pure grief; and there remains the quiet, insane hope that if you cannot escape the big blue of this feeling, you can learn it, get close to it. Hold it against your chest.

“I have not been so close to a person in a long time,” he says, and really, it should be impossible for Wonwoo to be heard, because just then they are entering a tunnel, where the wind whips louder for half a second before all sounds become song, becomes humming, becomes vacuum. 

But Jihoon does. Hear him. And Wonwoo hears him back too when he says, “Me, too.”

When they emerge from out of the tunnel and into what feels like a brand new light, Wonwoo feels very warm.

**Author's Note:**

> _Big blue, for once in my life I felt close to you._
> 
> Happy birthday to dearest Kai! And you, thank you for reading!  
>    
>  reference and inspirations:   
> [52 Blue by Leslie Jamison](https://magazine.atavist.com/52-blue) (where the italics - the letters, are from), the original study from [Deep Sea Research](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967063704001682), the ending [scene](https://youtu.be/Tbca2qkbr3U?t=31) from Fallen Angels (1995)  
> 


End file.
